We took the stairs back down to the squad waiting in the courtyard. “Davidson, there’s one thing I can’t figure out about you,” Gibson said behind me. “You don’t have the killer instinct man. Don’t you want this tour to mean anything?”
Even as a kid the kill had eluded me. It was a Thanksgiving tradition to head out toward Missoula and down a buck instead of a turkey, my dad said, because bucks could kill a man and that made the meat worth it. The only time I saw deer before that was when it was in flat and dry strips of jerky—the only thing we ate in the van on the long drive back to Lubbock. Then I turned ten and my dad said I was old enough to go out and learn the only thing my granddad passed down besides a weakness for cards. It was the hunt, and always with the same rifle. Granddad lifted a Mauser rifle from a Nazi he shot and carried it slung across his back all the way through Belgium and across the Rhine. He had one more dead kraut rifle than he did winter coats, using that line every time I asked him about the war. He moved to Montana a few years after my dad was born because it felt more like Bastogne, he said, harsh and desolate in the winter, and Bastogne was closer to what home was than Texas after that.
“Picture a buck,” my father told me as we rode in Granddad’s rusted out Chevy down I-90. “Now think of one your mom’s dinner plates, and stick it between the top of his front legs and the bottom of his neck.” He jammed his knee underneath the steering wheel to keep it straight and made a big circle with his hands over his chest. “That’s the boiler room. His heart and lungs. That’s the kill shot.”
We found the tree stand before the sky turned a smoky pink. The ladder bars were cold and wet and the rifle sling dug into my shoulder as I climbed. It was supposed to be the first time I held the rifle, but it wasn’t. I pulled it off the mantel late at night when everyone was asleep and slid my fingers down the barrel and across the trigger. It wasn’t like the trigger on my Nintendo light gun, plastic and mechanical that clunked when I pressed my finger down. It was smooth and powerful, producing a sharp clink after charging the bolt, loud and promising with its potential to kill every time you pulled the iron bolt back to your chest. I knew how to cycle the rifle without a round but pretended in the stand that I had never held it.
We waited for hours in the stand. Dad grumbled and peered through binoculars. His back stiffened. “Round that big pine at eleven o’clock, 150 yards. You see him?” Melted snow clouded the telescopic sight. I saw antlers atop a massive head. I put the sight a little lower to where I thought the boiler room would be. I choked on my own heartbeat as my finger failed to make the motion I had done a hundred times before as I liberated the furniture from imaginary fascists in raids glinted by moonlight. My finger slid down and rested in the trigger well. I lied and said I couldn’t see the deer, even though its breath steamed from throbbing, dark nostrils. It soon wandered away. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I whispered.
“It gets easier, Son. I promise,” he said. “It was hard for me too, but after your first you’ll see it gets easier, just like everything else.”
The IEDs were relentless. Big ones buried deep that we never encountered in other AOs until we were ordered to Baquba to flush out the bomb makers supplying Baghdad and northern Iraq. They were hitting our battalion daily, even off the main routes. The insurgents were using our trucks as iron maidens on wheels—a claustrophobic box where shrapnel buzzes though the air like yellow jackets trapped in a glass jar.
We had to do something different, even as our tour was ending in a month. No one wanted to be the guy who got himself killed just before going home. So our platoon filed into the fluorescent-soaked classroom on the edge of the outpost, and this guy with a pistol strapped to his thigh explained the concept of small kill teams.
He looked like CIA. We saw guys like him once in a while on post. His buddies rumbled through the compound in brand-new Silverados, the same you’d find on the farms lining I-90, except for the mounted machine guns in the back, manned by Billy Badasses growing bushy face armor under mirrored Oakley sunglasses.
“Complacency, complacency, complacency,” Billy began. “It’s killing you out there, gents. You’ve read the SIGACTs. Hell, you report the fuckers. Haj loves to use the same crater to plant an IED for the next patrol, or the intersection he sees you cross every day. But you already know that.” He paced back and forth gingerly like a physics professor about to reveal a daring new theory. “But you can also use complacency just like they do. Like any other weapon system.”
Billy clicked on a projector and a map of our sector was illuminated on the wall. Main roads were traced with red lines and IED strikes marked with yellow dots. The intersections we traveled most frequently were swollen with yellow grouping. It was a visual history of our dead and wounded. A dot for Johnson’s arm and eye by the cement factory. One dot for all three KIA from Charlie Company coming out of the palm groves. My eyes found the single yellow dot where the platoon lost Chase outside of the school. There was only one attack because we never went back, not after that. Not after what we did to that school.
“It’s about disruption,” Billy continued as he hocked a glob of tobacco-brown spit into a Styrofoam cup. “Small kill teams were first used up north in Mosul, and SIGACTs involving IED strikes went down a full third. Thirty percent, men. We’ve found the best method is four teams of five with round-the-clock eyes on for every hotspot. Small elements, less noise. You’ll need two, three days. You can last that long on the water and food you’ll bring with you.”
He paused a moment, standing there in front of the screen. Yellow dots projected onto his chest. “Questions?” he said.
Gibson raised his hand in front of me. “Yeah,” he said. “What about drop items, dey work?” His accent provoked stifled laughs in the room.
Billy let out a howl. “Not anymore, damn it! I know some guys in Baghdad got cute and started to plant all kinds of gear on the side of the road—copper wires and AK mags mostly. But kids will pick that shit up just the same, and once you’re down that road, you’ll end up engaging a kid for doing nothing except being a fucking kid.” His face tightened. “And embeds. Jesus. Those asswipes sit on your outpost, under your protection, eating your food, shitting in your toilets. And still they can’t wait for you to smoke a a little girl in front of them. Don’t earn them a Pulitzer. Roger?”
We shuffled out of the room to prep for the mission. Billy Badass stood by the projector. “Remember,” he called out to us. “Disruption.”
The house, we decided on an earlier patrol, had a good vantage point at the intersection of Route Blue Babe and Route Hatchet. This is what Billy Badass would call a hotspot—someplace Americans would patrol no matter how many yellow dots clustered around plant sites. A house with high rooftop walls and curtained windows overlooked the intersection, and the man who owned it—a sheepish and graying father with two kids and a wife, covered except for her milky eyes—didn’t object when we asked to stay at his house. We always chose a family man who had something to lose, which was the biggest tactical advantage we had in a place like Baquba. Sergeant Matthew poked a finger at the man’s chest and told him we’d come back at night with guns and rockets, and we might fire them inside, so they should stay somewhere else. And—this was stressed through our interpreter after we took a photo of his ID card and emailed it to battalion—if we came back the next night and some bad guys were waiting for us instead of an empty house, we’d find him and tape a sandbag over his head and drive past our outpost, past Route Tacoma, past the old leper colony, all the way back, we mimed with hands and solemn faces, to the last place where the women stand outside a razor wire–tipped gate to learn if they are widows or just the wives of disappeared men. Did he understand that?
“Yes, Mister,” he said to Sergeant Matthew in English. “Yes yes yes, Mister.”
We always left the main gate and took the same left toward Route Tacoma, passed by the same wide expanses of farmland, the same stretch of road where hardball pavement weaved into dirt roads, fertile ground for plant
ing improvised bombs. The azaleas of guerilla warfare. That’s where Johnson lost his right eye and arm to a blossom of molten copper darts that sliced through the lightly armored belly, tumbled through steel and bone and out toward the sky, which cooled and solidified as they fell back to earth like gleaming, elongated raindrops. We sent him a video of us burying a chunk of his forearm in a mock funeral while he recovered in Germany. “Here rests Johnson’s ability to jerk off like a normal human being,” Gibson barely recited before doubling over. “We’ll cover for you.”
We waited for nightfall at the outpost. Waiting for something to happen or not happen is the biggest preoccupation in war. Waiting for chow to arrive. Waiting for the guy in the port-a-shitter to finish jacking off with a rolled-up copy of Club magazine. Gibson waited for the email from home with the terms of divorce he would file on leave. After 2-3 was hit, the Stryker that Chase was driving, the platoon waited for our medic to say he was dead while Gibson looked for the finger that may still have held Chase’s wedding ring before we moved toward the school. Most of the bombs you never see, so you wait until your eardrums tell you another one exploded. And then you wait to hear whose voice doesn’t respond to a head count as dust masks the world, and you can barely make out the command on the radio intercomm to kill everything within one hundred meters because even the kids know where the bombs are buried and they wait for them to explode too.
Gibson and I waited for the mission at the card table at the outpost. He was short and stocky, with an angular face and narrow slits obscuring his eyes, as if he were in a constant state of waking up. He shuffled the cards under the table even though I said it was bad etiquette.
“Look around you, dude. This ain’t the Vegas strip. The fuck you need etiquette for here?” Gibson bent the deck into a shuffle and dealt a round of Texas Hold ’Em.
My dad taught me card games in Montana when we weren’t out on the tree stand. He said the family never had much luck, so we always had to play the man and not the cards. He taught me to watch the hands. Players would hide their widening pupils behind sunglasses, but their fingers, excitedly and clumsily grasping at chips to stack and push forward to the center, revealed cards worth playing. Steady hands were a sign of muck. A man will tell you everything with his hands, he once said.
I played Gibson long enough to know that he sat back and held his cards sideways if they were worth keeping. He peaked under his cards after the flop, rotating them down. I mucked the cards.
“Already? Pussy.” He tossed his cards away and shuffled under the table for another hand. “Those shitbirds,” he said as cards glided across felt faded by mildew. “They keep hitting us because we drive by the same hotspots. Wait til they try it tonight.” He held a rifle made of air with an imaginary scope pointed at me. “Fuckin’ baaaang. Teach these guys to be as retarded as us.”
There was an unmistakable sound of boot on metal cot. Sergeant Matthew kicked every frame lined against the other side of the wall and came over to the table. “Get your shit on,” he said. “SKT mission got pushed up. We’re out the gate in fifteen mikes.” Sergeant Matthew looked over at me while tightening his chin-strap. “Davidson,” he grinned. “Get lucky on the gun and you just might lose your fuckin’ cherry this time.”
We could barely move in the trucks. Each man had a rucksack on his lap—extra ammunition, three days’ worth of food, twelve liters of water, socks, batteries, backup batteries, poncho liners, dented iPods, paperbacks with torn covers, and porn magazines. The junior guys carried five-gallon water cans, rocket launchers, and belts of machine-gun rounds. The buckles of my ruck dug into my knees and the truck’s engine whirred as we made toward Blue Babe. Everyone slept, their heads bobbing sharply as the vehicle made its turns.
We reached the infiltration point a klick from the house. The engine idled and the vehicle commander keyed up the intercom to drop the ramp and the squad spilled into the moonless street.
Gibson lugged one of the five-gallon jugs in his ruck. Sergeant Matthew motioned us to double-time. The team began to jog, and Gibson, with the water can slamming against the side of his ruck more violently, stumbled on a curb and crashed into a metal gate. He grasped at my arm to regain his footing as his machine gun sling pulled him forward.
“Infil this far out, weighed down if we get ambushed,” Gibson muttered quietly. He spat into the darkness. “This is gay as fuck.”
Sergeant Matthew chewed through a lock with bolt cutters and shoved us inside. The desert sun roasted concrete houses during the day, releasing heat through the night like the embers of a fading bonfire. Putrid air hung in all the rooms, and we poured water on the rooftop so we could lie without shirts as midnight prayers streamed from the minaret of a nearby mosque. We crawled on our stomachs to keep out of sight; only five of us held the house, and insurgents could storm it with suicide vests and grenades before another team could reinforce us. As Gibson would say, we weren’t going to leave pretty corpses. Sergeant Matthew set up an M4 with an infrared scope pointed toward the intersection, and rockets lined the living room wall in case of an overrun. Gibson drew up a guard list and handed it to me. “No sleep for you, dickcheese,” he said, and unfurled his sleeping bag to crawl inside with an iPod blaring the unmistakable beat of Dropkick Murphys through cheap earbuds.
I sat on a foldout chair and watched the intersection through a thermal scope. The procession of squeaky sedans and rumbling trucks slowed as curfew approached. After midnight prayer, roads were limited to emergency use only and anyone riding in a car could be rolled up. Most tended to keep off the road after sundown to avoid checkpoints and the trigger fingers of anxious Americans, known to spasm in moments of uncertainty, when the fog of war became cataracts. The rest of the squad lay on the floor, catching an hour or two of sleep before guard rotations came up. Sergeant Matthew was passed out face-first on a book. Gibson bunched up a uniform top to use as a pillow. The living room was sparse. A small TV sat in the corner and two lumpy couches lined a wall. The beds were hard and uncomfortable and no one slept in them; Iraqis used them only for sex and otherwise slept on thin dusty mats. Cheap cologne masked the smell of a toilet basin in the corner.
Time is no longer time when you sit and wait for something to happen, when the mind searches for a memory to override the apocalyptic tones of an IR scope, where bodies look like white phantoms gliding against black emptiness. But the streets were barren. No cars, no people, nothing to mark the presence of civilization except the constant buzz of generators whirring on rooftops. We were one hour on, four hours off, and it was nearly time for a shift change. The radio next to the chair read 0:45. Sergeant Matthew’s face was still in the book.
“Yo, Sergeant,” I whispered and shined a red lens light on his face. “You got guard.” He inhaled deeply and rubbed his eyes. “Fuck,” he said. “I’m up.” He reached for his boots, and I sat back in the chair to peer through the scope. A sedan’s taillights glowed at the intersection. “Hurry up, Sergeant. Eyes on a car that must’ve just pulled up.”
Two men flickered as white-hot beams in front of the trunk. Sergeant Matthew came over with one boot on and yanked the scope from me. “Fuckin’ shit,” he whispered. “Get on the gun.”
Sergeant Matthew edged his burly Tennessean body into the window. “I got eyes on,” he said. “What’d we figure, 150 meters at the intersection?” I told him that sounded right, steadying the rifle on the window sill as I peered through my night vision monocle. My laser painted a faint green dot on one of their backs.
“I don’t see weapons,” I said to Sergeant Matthew, “but they’re definitely grabbing shit with both hands.”
“Fertilizer? Or a 155-round, maybe?” Sergeant Matthew said. “What do you think?” The infrared beam refracted on the target’s shirt and spread across his boiler room. We were within the rights of ROE, I thought. Or I could explain it that way later, on the witness statement. “I’m gonna put a round through the fucker on the left, call it up on the radio,” I said. I s
witched the safe off and held my breath, like I learned in the tree stand. I pulled the trigger.
The target fell to the ground hard, like a cartoon anvil tumbling out of a window, and the rest of the squad scrambled from their sleep and threw on vests and helmets. Gibson raced over in his shorts and slapped me on the back.
“Aw fuck yeah, finally Davidson!” he shouted. “Canoe that fucker!” The rest of the squad stood behind us, gathering equipment and chambering rounds in their rifles. Sergeant Matthew squawked into the radio to another position to light up the car with a machine gun. “Second guy, eleven o’ clock,” Sergeant Matthew shouted into my ringing ears. “He’s booking it.” I fired. He didn’t drop, and scrambled over a courtyard wall. “He bounced,” I shouted. The gun team opposite the inspection opened up and the car’s side exploded in sparks as rounds tore through the car to kill anyone still inside. A tracer started a fire among trash in the median.
We were compromised. Sergeant Matthew called up the other teams to tell them to pack up and get ready to move out. The rest of our team stuffed their gear into rucksacks. We left the water and food behind and stepped out into the courtyard. The squad snaked its way through the neighborhood as the dogs scampered and barked among small sewage dugouts. The rest of the platoon had already arrived at the staging point to meet our trucks, the vehicles creating a box around the car for security. Their headlights pierced the darkness beyond the intersection, where other hot spots simmered for the next patrol. Sergeant Matthew ordered us to gather up any weapons left at the scene. The car would stay. Some Iraqi unit would have to come collect the body and blow the car in place in case it had explosives. Sergeant Matthew slowly approached the car and looked for wires.
“Gibson,” he said. “Search this fuck.” Most of the target’s body was veiled in darkness, but his face glowed red from the taillights above him. Gibson slung his rifle and stuck his hands into the dead man’s jean pockets. “Hey Davidson,” Sergeant Matthew said to me. “You brought your camera, right? We need to document this for battalion.”
The Road Ahead Page 4